Music for Plays
Below you will find a selection of original works for the stage.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Mauckingbird Theatre Company & Hedgerow Theatre - July 2024
When Peter Reynolds, the artistic director of Mauckingbird Theatre Company, approached me to write music for their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream I was instantly fascinated by the reimagining that he created.
Athens is an elite boarding school, where four students find themselves in a supernaturally heightened love tangle. Hermia is being forced by her father to marry Demetrius, a young man in her class. But she is already in love with Lysander, a young woman in her class.
Meanwhile, her best friend -a young man named Helena- is smitten with Demetrius. When the four schoolmates run off into the forest, full of mischievous fairies and beguiling visions, mayhem and surprising discoveries meet them at every turn.
...With the help of a little magic, of course.
Since the piece was centered around a boarding school I wanted to create a grand school song to bring us into the world. I have always loved writing pastiche, so I knew this would be a fun place to start. I listened to school songs from all the Ivy League schools, as well as plenty of Baroque and Classical orchestral pieces. I started by writing out a piano piece that had the feel I wanted, then orchestrated it.
Midsummer takes place in two worlds, our world and the world of the fairies. I wanted to create a piece that represented the fairies, and the world that they inhabit. We are merely visiting their world, so I wanted the audience to feel like they were in a place that was simultaneously familiar yet foreign.
One of the more challenging pieces I wrote was the Roundel and Fairy Song. Peter explained that the roundel was a round dance that Shakespeare often associated with fairies. Writing a dance piece was something I hadn’t done before, so my first task was to get insight from the choreographer. Our choreographer, Yana Vilchynskaya, said she wanted the dance to be “bright, whimsy, with a slight hint of mischief for the overall tone”. In the end, I am very happy with how this piece turned out and I am grateful I was able to collaborate with Yana.
In the show, we also follow the mechanicals, a group of actors who are about to put on a very important show. Peter wanted some fun and bouncy with a strong button ending. Since the string quartet was at the heart of all of the pieces for this show, I wrote a pizzicato violin motif and surrounded it with active parts in the other instruments.
Group Project was written/developed by Lindsay Goss in collaboration with Temple University theater students as a part of the 2022 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Goss and her students created a piece that was abstract, absurd, and daring with a world that matched.
Temple University - Sept. 2022
Group Project
On the day of the big test, a high school classroom spirals into chaos. Teachers are missing and none of the questions make sense. Will the students play along? Or is it time to take what they’ve learned and build a new world?
For this show, I wrote two pieces. First was a simple piece of elevator music playing over the intercom. This was the first clue to the audience that we were in a world of absurdity. Second was a piece underscoring a beautiful monologue. After seeing a run of the show during tech, I saw a moment that I thought would be heightened with music. I asked the director if I could write something, and I recorded a short demo on the train home.
Small Mouth Sound
Small Mouth Sounds by Bess Wohl was a fascinating piece to work on. This show takes place in a silent retreat, and most of the show is in silence. This presented a very specific challenge, but let me play with an aspect of sound that I don’t often play with. Silence
The first piece I wanted to write for this show was my take on meditation music. I spent a lot of time listening to Tibetan singing bowls, meditation-videos, and whale songs. While listening I realized that because of my Autism, I was having very strong reactions to the music, both psychological and physical. I then decided I would take all this into account and create music that made my Autistic brain feel amazing. I created an atmospheric soundscape with a deep droning bass line, and bells, and combined it with a calm but dense monophonic melody played on several instruments.
American Lives Theatre - Dec. 2021
For some simple transitional moments that brought us from night into day, I wanted to create a simple melody that could be played using several instruments that would make sense in modern meditation music, but give it a slight sense of tension. The slightly off-tempo with the slight instability of the mode gave it just the right amount of tension. I then set this theme using a Koto and later a Kalimba.
Argonautika
This was one of my largest projects to date. During my meeting with the director, he told me how important the sound was to this show. He talked about waves crashing, monsters screaming, and music that supported the traveling that was taking place on stage. He wanted the music to sound authentic to the Greecian story while adding elements of ambiance. In the end, this show had around 100 cues and was completely underscored. The final score was a balanced mix of acoustic and digital, natural and synthetic, as well as ancient and modern
One challenge of the show was finding the aural world of some of the creatures. After the death of a character, his ghost comes to talk to one of the friends he left behind. I took a sample of bells I had used previously for this character and applied several filters, adding a layer of the same sound reversed under it, to show the uneasy work he now enhanced. For the Dryope I wanted to mix a bit of the magical with some natural elements. Once we got to the heart of the Dryope’s lair we heard the sounds of the water dripping in their cave while also hearing the echos of a non-diegetic choir singing through stone walls
Marian University - Mar. 2019
Another important aspect to this show was the non-diegetic underscoring of specific emotional moments. The first moment we have is Jason giving Libations to the gods right before he and his crew set off on their journey on the Argonautika. Moments after Idmon is thrown into a vision, a Prophecy of their death and ultimate failure. I took some themes from the show and played them backward while adding other atmospheric sounds to give hints to what would be heard later on, while also showing what was going on in Idmon’s head.
The Rollcall took place early in the show, and introduces us to the crew that Jason is taking on his quest. I decided to mix percussion instruments from all over the world to create a piece that spanned the world just like the crew was about to do.
Out of all of the cues I wrote, this moment meant the most to me. At the end of the show, Hera and Athena come out and, in a fourth-wall-breaking moment, talk about the absurdity of what just happened. Then Hera asks what happened to all of those who died along the way, and Athena simply responds with “Look up”. We then find out that all those who die became the zodiac signs we see in the night sky. As soon as I read this the phrase “naming of the stars” came into mind. I heard the swelling strings playing in chorus, I heard bells twinkling in the sky, and I felt the grandiose nature of space wanting to fill the theater.